The Lazarus Syndrome
by BellatrixLestrangey
Summary: Part of Goretober 2019. Prompt: Rebirth. Via a black magic ritual, Icy pursues a last ditch effort to bring her sister back from the dead.


**Note - The episode with her sister has not aired in English so I'm not sure if she's actually dead. No less, Sapphire is dead in this fic.**

**Warning for a mention of animal sacrifice.**

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Blood flows in rivulets from her left hand, she holds a dagger in the right. Icy moves towards the bubbling sludge pit and holds her hand over it, watching as large droplets meet the mud. It is the final ingredient. A night prior she had tossed a stork into the sludge and watched it struggle to lift wings weighed down by thick muck. Listened to its distressed squeaks as it sank deeper and deeper. And the night before that one, she had tossed a necklace in. A beautiful string of deep purple onyx beads and amethyst center stone. A thing that bore potent significance to her.

But it is just as well, that sacrifice will go a long way.

Her head spins as her blood falls away. She wonders if she has given enough. She holds her hand there for a moment longer before bandaging it up. She picks up her book, a thing she'd stolen from Cloud Tower's restricted section. She runs her hand over its black leather cover before flipping to the page she'd marked. She whispers the incantation to herself several times before moving towards the now smoking pit.

She closes her eyes and begins the chant, it sounds much more sinister with added volume. She almost wonders if she should be speaking it at all. The deep crimson glow radiating from her palms tells her that it is too late for second guessing.

She releases the energy. It licks and laps at the mud below until the bubbles on in the silt share the red luminescence. They burst in spatters of red, darker than Icy's blood. The scent they release is vile.

Absolutely rancid like meat left out in summer heat. Icy takes a step back, fighting against her gag reflex. The smell only grows more potent with each bubble's pop.

She can't tell if the ritual has worked or not.

The bubbles come more frequently and the sludge churns. In a series of sucking, slurping noises, something begins to emerge. Icy's heart seizes briefly. She can make out fingers.

A hand reaches up from the ooze, grasping feebly at the air.

It looks wrong, wrong like the flesh is made of wax or dough. Perhaps it is just a trick of the sludge.

Brown slime runs down a spindly arm. She can see a face now.

She can see it and she staggers back.

This thing, this creature...whatever it is, it isn't her sister. It isn't her Sapphire.

Its face is too gaunt, its eyes held only the vaguest semblance of life. Icy wouldn't call it life at all. It holds only the most basic sentiance. And from those eyes weeps a black ooze with the consistency of molasses. The very same ooze that gurgles out of the undead child's mouth

With a wet slurp the rest of the body breaks free. Icy can't really call it a body for it has no structure. The arm that had previously emerged jutted out from an exposed ribcage. Organs beating between them a grotesque and pulsing blend of viscera and brown-black muck.

"Where's mama?" Its speech is gurgly and guteral but somehow maintained the light, high pitch of a child. "Where am I?"

Icy holds her breath as she stares at the monstrosity that she'd crafted. Its eyes find her.

"Icy, it hurts." The cries it unleashes are ungodly. It sounds like the mud in its lungs. It sounds suffocated and tormented as it wails endlessly and Icy has no idea how to put a stop to it.

She drives a spike of ice through its head and still it wails away. She doesn't know how to send what is left of her sister back to the peaceful realm of the dead where she belongs.

Icy's breathing goes erratic. She has to send her sister back. She has to release her soul once more, but she doesn't know how and the book, that vile book. It doesn't say how. She curses herself for being a fool. For tampering with magic so black that it scared the most powerful of witches.

She feels fingers wrap around her ankle, she drops the book.

"It hurts so bad. Icy, it hurts so bad." She can barely distinguish what it is saying. It doesn't help that she is focused on the mushy feeling of its fingers. "Are you mad at me?" It asks.

"N-No." Icy sputters. "Why would you think…"

"Why are you hurting me?"

Icy grows fainter still as she struggles to come up with a way to remove Sapphire's soul from the flesh heap in front of her. She knows that she is going to have to go to Griffin. She knows that it will lead her to a particularly harsh punishment. The magic community doesn't take lightly to necromancers. Especially reckless ones that tap into the most forbidden methods, only to botch the spell.

But the further she studies the pages, the more it adds up; she hadn't botched it at all.

In fact she has pulled off the most tricky form of black magic rebirth. Perhaps if she had read a little closer she would have known that she had worked with a spell for vengeance. A spell designed to take fallen enemies and sloppily reanimate them for a new existence of pure and unhindered torment.

Perhaps if she had simply cut a few corners to make a lazy ritual, she would have had the results she'd intended. As things are, Icy has pulled off a deed most necromancers could only fantasize about.

She is no necromancer. For her the spectacle before her is a visual from a nightmare.

Of all the vial and evil things she has done, she knows that this is the worst of them. She doesn't believe that Griffin and the council can come up with a suitable punishment. Perhaps that is why, when Sapphire says, "come with" me and begins pulling her into the bubbling pit, Icy doesn't resist.

Her body slips into the silt. Two little, skeletal arms wrap around her waist. "I missed you, Icy."

"I missed you too."


End file.
